Aliens are hungry for Ufo Tofu! Make symbol palindromes on a Bejeweld-like board. Snake your cursor around the field to find mirrored patterns. Be careful, though, as the aliens will eat the first palindrome you show them, even if it's shorter than intended.

Controls:
arrows - move cursor
z - warp to centre

Made for the Sydney NSI Game Jam 10, when I only had access to an Ubuntu machine, so I decided to learn Pico-8 for the first time. This is the result! :)

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This one has really grown on me, at first I thought it looked a bit boring and only gave it a quick go, but later I decided to give it a little more time and started to get the hang of it. Now I have played through "Short Game" about 5 times and am having a great time!

A very clever idea - perhaps a beginner mode where you need to press a key before finishing a palindrome could be added?

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I'd like to avoid time-based effects in a turn-based game. Perhaps I should just highlight when a palindrome is found, prevent extending the path beyond that but allow backtracking, then wait for confirmation? That takes away the "Oh damn, I didn't mean to do that", but that's both a good and bad thing.

Alternately, I can just do it the way it is, which I personally enjoy playing. Once you know the rules, you know it's your own fault when it happens, not the game's.

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I don't think it needs an easy mode. It's a good PICO-8 sized game as it is, and I immensely enjoyed playing it. Finding palindromes is inherently satisfying, and making that into a puzzle game was a great idea.

I too have some puzzle games that 'could' be made into mobile games, but I still haven't got around to it.